Running out of storage, overwhelmed by spam, or loads of information downloading upon you that isn’t important for your survival? As it’s Spring now, the season calls for a bit of cleaning (get on your Marie Kondo). Here’s a step by step guide to digitally detoxing your life and making it work the best for you!
- Organize your inbox by creating folders or labels to categorize the emails that come in. You can categorize your folders by person, subject, company or department, i.e. work, home, bills, etc., and then filter your emails to direct them to their respective folders.
- Keep clearing your inbox by archiving old emails. You can even ‘send and archive’ messages so that the email gets archived as soon as you send it. New messages in an archived conversation will still pop into your inbox.
- Delete spam and junk emails. You can do this by searching for emails from common senders and deleting them all at once. To make this easier in the future, start directing incoming spam straight to the trash.
- Manage the mail that’s coming to you by unsubscribing to any newsletters that you don’t need anymore. A helpful app to streamline this process is Unroll.me. Unroll.me allows you to review all your subscriptions and decide whether to unsubscribe or roll multiple emails into a single message which results in fewer emails.
- If your email notifications distract you, turn them off and set a scheduled time each day to check your mail.
- Once you’ve got this down, maintain your newly cleaned inbox by deleting emails as you cease to need them.
Social media
- Make your newsfeed relevant to you! Facebook organizes your newsfeed to what it thinks interests you but take this into your own hands by customizing it to what you want to see and who you want to hear from. You can select certain friends to follow and unselect those you don’t want to.
- If you see a post you’re not interested in, hide it so that it doesn’t come up again.
- Continue on this streak by organizing the groups you are part of and the pages you have liked. Leave groups that don’t interest you anymore and unlike pages that aren’t significant to you.
- It’s likely that we all have friends on Facebook who we don’t really know or aren’t friends with anymore. To clear this, go through your friend list and delete whoever you’re not currently connected to.
- Likewise, respond to all your current friend requests.
- While clearing up what you see, take the time to clean out and update the information and photos you’re sharing with others. Make sure your profile is current, delete any irrelevant posts on your timeline, and update the visibility setting of your photos – delete/ hide/untag yourself from any old/embarrassing/irrelevant pictures.
- Once you’ve wrapped up, check your privacy settings and adjust them to the level you’d like so that you’re aware of what others have access to.
- Again, to get the most of the app, keep your feed relevant to you. Unfollow accounts that you’re indifferent to, don’t know why you’re following anymore, or that don’t make you feel good.
- If there are any accounts you need to follow but don’t want to necessarily see, mute their posts and/or stories.
- Block any accounts you don’t want any likes, comments or DMs from. These can include people you don’t want to interact with or bots and trolls.
- Go through all the posts and collections you’ve saved and unsave any that you haven’t looked at in a while or that aren’t necessary or appealing anymore.
- Update your posts and your highlights. If there are any posts that don’t fit in with your current visual aesthetic or don’t make sense anymore, archive them. Similarly, edit highlights that haven’t been updated in a while or that are now outdated or irrelevant.
- Cut through all the Twitter noise by curating lists of those you follow so you can find and share relevant information quicker.
- Start unfollowing inactive accounts and accounts you’re not interested in anymore. A Marie Kondo-inspired app called Tokimeki Unfollow helps declutter your accounts and bring some joy to your feed.
- Filter your feed to those you want to get updates from by muting tweets from those you don’t.
- Review your profile and information and make sure it’s all current. While doing this, also make sure your profile image, header image, and pinned tweet (if you have one) are fresh and relevant!
- To purge your account of old tweets but still save them, try Jumbo, a handy privacy-themed app that makes it incredibly easy to delete and archive your messages.
- Twitter updates their privacy settings regularly so it’s good to check your settings and ensure they’re up-to-date. Once you’ve done this, you’ll know exactly how visible you are.
How do you digitally declutter? Give this a try and let us know what works for you in the comments!
